Cape Cod

by William Martin

  So Autumnsquam jumped down to lighten the load, and when they reached the top of the rise, he let the animal rest. He could see the harbor and the tip of Cummaquid itself, the wild stretch of sand that protected the salt marsh. In the Indian language, Cummaquid meant “long point,” but the whites called it Sandy Neck. Where once the Nauset had met the Cummaquid to trade and feast, an orange trying fire fouled the sky.

  Even the land had lost its dignity.

  ix.

  “I worry for Father Jack.” Patience stirred clam chowder over the fire.

  “I put him to bed and gave him beer. He will sleep.” Christopher warmed his hands, then his backside, over the flames, but he knew that this night, nothing would warm his soul.

  “Still I worry for him.”

  “I worry more for him.” Christopher looked at the boy, who sat on a stool, rocking back and forth, speaking again and again the first verse of the Twenty-third Psalm. “He has not the strength of experience nor the resignation of age. Me and thou, we know of God’s ways. And Father knows enough to sleep.”

  “No man sleep on the night he learn his son dead.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “I go to him.”

  “He curses Indians, and God, too. He curses them for taking all the Hilyard women.” Christopher slipped his arms around her girth. “I did not remind him that one Hilyard woman remains, and she is an Indian.”

  Amapoo smiled. Though her hair had gone gray, her teeth were still even and straight, and her pockmarks had faded into soft wrinkles on her face. “A Quaker Indian.”

  x.

  Simeon Bigelow shuddered to hear the awful news, and he sorrowed to go among the wetus and tell the women that their men had died with Captain Pierce and Captain Hilyard.

  That night, he convened a service to remember the dead and pray for a just end to the war. But among the Nausets who gathered in the candlelight of the little meetinghouse, Simeon heard as much anger as grief. Their men had died for those who did not trust them enough to let them leave Cape Cod alone, who thought them better off in Praying Towns and plantations than living free in the land of their fathers.

  One young man, named Keweenut, was bold enough to say that King Philip might even have had the right idea.

  Simeon Bigelow sensed that a single small incident might make his Portanimicut Plantation explode, and if the Nausets joined the fight, so might all the other Cape Cod Indians, and then there would be disaster for all.

  When he had comforted his people as best he could, Simeon resolved to go and comfort his old friend Jack. He asked Keweenut and some of the others to accompany him on the four-mile walk, so that they could see that the suffering of the war touched both races.

  xi.

  Jack put on his cloak and felt hat, shoved the pistols into his belt, and lit his whale oil lantern.

  In the barn he reached under the floorboards and pulled out the axe. He had found it in the mud, though he no longer remembered where. He had used it to chop off an Indian head and bring peace that had lasted fifty years. He would use it now to bring peace again.

  He unwrapped the canvas and wiped off the oil that protected the axe head against rust. The metal glittered in the lamplight. He ran his thumb over the blade, then across the strange letters engraved in the iron. He wondered what devil god they paid worship.

  A bloody cold night it was, and rainy, too… a miserable night to walk to Portanimicut, but the perfect kind of night to kill devils.

  Autumnsquam tethered his horse to a tree near the edge of the marsh. He had not forgotten his last sight of this place, red and gold in the warm October sun. He had thought never to see it again. Now it appeared like death, a black mass in the sheeting rain, a sodden bog surrounding it.

  He could not cross the marsh on horseback. The tide was high and the animal too exhausted to pull himself through the muck. Nor could Autumnsquam carry Jonathan on his back. He was an old man, after all. He would need help. He covered Jonathan as best he could, then stepped onto the planking.

  Meanwhile Patience came through the woods to Jack’s house. It was raining so hard that several times the flame in her lantern was splashed and guttered.

  But she had been right about Jack. No man could sleep on the night he had learned of his son’s death. Lamps glowed in every room, and sad light slanted from every window. She pushed open the door and called, but there was no answer. Up the narrow stairs she went to the bedroom. The bed was turned down and rumpled. Then she glanced out the window and saw the light moving south toward the marsh.

  She lowered her own lantern and threw open the window. She called Jack’s name, but the rain washed away the sound.

  When Autumnsquam was halfway across the marsh, he saw the lantern swinging toward him. It stopped for a moment at the top of the island path; then it descended. At first, the old Indian felt the urge to run. Instead, he waved and called, “Hallooo!”

  Above the steady pounding of the rain, Jack thought he could hear voices. It might be the wind, or it might be the devils. If he put out his lantern, he could see into the distance, but then he could not see the way in front of him, and if he stepped off the planking, he would sink into the mud and they would kill him.

  Then, more clearly, he heard a man shouting “Halloo!” Then he heard a woman calling his name from behind. A light was appearing at the top of the island path, and two more lights were glimmering to life on the far side of the marsh.

  The devils… surrounding him. But Jack Hilyard was too old to feel panic. He gripped the handle of one of the pistols and prepared to fight.

  The woman on the island path was coming after him. Her lantern was descending… but she was an Indian. She would try to stop him from doing what he had to do.

  He pulled a pistol and fired. Her lanternlight disappeared. Then he drew the other pistol and turned toward the shadow now stopped no more than twenty feet away.

  “Who’s there?” shouted Jack. “Speak or I’ll shoot you, too.”

  “It Autumnsquam. Old Autie, Jack Stupid Bloody Christian Hilyard.”

  Jack remembered. He almost smiled. But no. It was a trick… a devil Indian who knew an old name… a devil whose friends were now hurrying after him with their lanterns.

  “Autumnsquam’s dead,” he said.

  “No.” The shadow came toward him.

  Jack lowered his lantern so that he could better see in the dark rain.

  “I bring your son to—”

  Jack fired. In the muzzle flash, he saw white whales’ teeth shatter as the ball struck the Indian’s throat. White whales’ teeth… Autumnsquam… The devil was the great dissembler. Autie was not coming back….

  Now Jack pulled the axe from his belt and rushed toward the lanterns entering the marsh from the mainland.

  “Jack! Stop!” someone was shouting at him, a familiar voice, a white man’s voice, but the only face he could see in the lanternlight was Indian.

  Satan took many forms… and spoke in many voices.

  “Stop!”

  Jack barreled into the Indian, swinging the axe as he went. The Indian shouted and tried to sidestep, but Jack swung hard and felt the blade bite into flesh and bone.

  “Jack!” screamed one of the others. “God has given us a miracle.”

  “Tempt me with no miracles. Satan tempted Christ with miracles in the desert. See what happened to him!” Jack knew that the Indian was not dead, so he raised the axe again.

  “No, Jack! Thou’ll start a war!”

  Jack recognized the voice of Simeon Bigelow. “I finish one.”

  Simeon grabbed Jack’s arm.

  Jack pushed him back and swung the axe. If Satan could take the form of Autumnsquam, he could as easily become a white preacher. “Get back.”

  “But Jack, thy son—”

  “You’ve killed him—” And the grief-mad old man turned his axe at another old friend.

  Simeon was bigger than Jack, but near as brittle, and as he tried to wrench the axe away, he slipped, pulli
ng the axe and Jack with him into the soaking marsh.

  The black rain poured down. Its black sound roared down. And the blade of the axe split Jack Hilyard’s breast.

  xii.

  It had begun in blood, and that was as it ended. It had begun in horror, but for the Hilyards, some small measure of order was restored, some sense of God’s mercy remained. An ancient father died before his son after all. A son returned from the land of the dead to raise up his own son in the name of the Lord. A wife survived the pistol shot that shattered her lantern. And two old friends, one who brought the future, one who had been the past, were laid side by side in a small grove of pines near Nauseiput Creek.

  Young Jeremiah read from the Twenty-third Psalm as though he truly understood it. Jonathan leaned on Patience and she upon Christopher. And Praying Indians filled the woods.

  Simeon prayed once more for a just end to a terrible war. He thanked God for his goodness, and then, as an afterthought, he thanked Kautantowit. He knew it was a small blasphemy, but it seemed to please the older Indians, and it would have pleased Autumnsquam.

  Then the strange funeral procession wound its way back through the woods and cut-over meadows to Jack’s house, where Patience had prepared a repast in honor of the dead.

  “Thou shalt never know how pained I am at killing thy father,” said Simeon to Christopher before they went in.

  “ ’Twas an accident.”

  Simeon shook his head. “Had he killed an Indian, or an Indian killed him, there would have been terrible days on Cape Cod, days to make Satan happy.”

  “Thou hast done more than any man to keep Satan at bay. My father said thou wert the most best man he ever knew. And he kept somethin’ I think it meet for thee to have.”

  Christopher led Simeon to the new barn that had been built on the site of the first one. Pulling back a trapdoor, he climbed down into the ancient hole, and after a few moments he found the ballast stone that his father had split in half many years before. Fitted neatly behind it, the color of the earth into which it had been pressed, was a wax-sealed box. Stamped in the corner was the foundry mark of a man long dead. Inside was the narrative of a people who would grow large in the memories of their children.

  He pressed the box into Simeon’s hands. “Read this, old friend. Then do with it what thou wilt.”

  “What is it?”

  “The sea journal of Christopher Jones.”

  Simeon hefted the box as if to feel the weight of history. “Jones was a rough man, but a good’n.”

  “He admired the First Corners, though he spoke as well of their failings.”

  Simeon looked into Christopher’s eyes. “Did he speak of my brother and Dorothy Bradford within the same pages?”

  Christopher could not tell what Simeon knew or suspected, and so he merely nodded.

  “Is that the reason thou now owns this island?”

  “We went through much hell to get this place. If God favor papists, we may burn in hell for our effort. But that book worked its magic upon thy brother… rightly or wrongly.”

  “Why give it to me?”

  “ ’Tis an ode to faith and bravery, written by a man of little faith. Thou art a man of faith and bravery preachin’ to those with little faith.” Christopher patted the box with his hand. “Thy faith and bravery saved this Cape from the horror that Jonathan’s family suffered at Plymouth. This book is an ode to thee.”

  Simeon looked at the box, then at the axe that lay against the grindstone. “I will take the box if you rebury the axe, as once I asked your father to do.”

  “Done.”

  “The axe is not somethin’ I care to look on again.” He held up the box. “But this will I read.”

  And he read both the good and the bad of it. And yes, it told of his brother and Dorothy Bradford dallying on the deck of the Mayflower. Yet it spoke most delicately of delicate matters. And during the dying time, Jones spoke of Ezra, of all the First Comers, as men of strong faith and Christian kindness.

  When King Philip’s War ended, however, their descendants proved that for all God’s interest in their affairs, they had learned little of God’s mercy.

  King Philip was run to earth in August, in the same Rhode Island swamplands where he had heard the warlike counsel of Autumnsquam and the others. What hopelessness he felt for his race when the whites at last encircled him would never be known. He was shot, beheaded, drawn, and quartered. His hands were sent to Boston, his head to Plymouth. The four pieces of his torso were hung in the trees.

  This did not shock Simeon. He had seen Witawawmut’s head rot in the sun. He knew the language of war. But he could not understand the new path to peace. He was in Plymouth, when the captives of the last battles were brought through. Wampanoag men and women, linked by chains and rope, their children clutching at their sides, had less the appearance of beaten enemies than of broken hearts. Most of the men sensed that they were leaving their land forever, and this journey was their last walk with their loved ones.

  Plymouth had suffered greatly, though in truth no worse than the Indians. The colony had incurred bills of great magnitude, 27,000 pounds in all. The tax levy had been enormous. But still the debt remained. So it was decided that those who had caused the war—or, more truthfully, those who had lost it—would pay for it.

  The proposal, forwarded by many of the most learned men of the colony, and most vociferously by Brewster Bigelow, was to sell the captured Wampanoags into slavery.

  Simeon never forgot the sight of families broken up on the hallowed ground of Plymouth, within the shadow of the burial hill where the First Comers lay. This was not what God had wanted, nor what William Bradford would have permitted. But it was done.

  Some of the luckier Indians were given to Plymouth men in payment for wartime loans. These might be well treated and see their loved ones again. A few might even gain freedom and move to the Mashpee Plantation on Cape Cod, where many Wampanoag families had fled. But the rest were marched on to Boston. From thence would they be shipped to the West Indies, to be sold and to die in the pestilent climate.

  “ ’Twas not necessary, nephew,” Simeon told Brewster as they watched the Wampanoags straggling sadly north under the muskets of the Plymouth militia. “A hand of peace would have done you better.”

  “ ’Twas Satan put ’em here, uncle. Every minister believes that. They proved it at Clarkes’ garrison house. We do the Lord’s work in wipin’ ’em from the earth.”

  “They be humans, no different from us in their hearts.”

  At the sound of Brewster Bigelow’s laughter, Simeon resolved that he would not share with such men the story of their fathers’ faith. He saw, in that beaten chain of Indians, the perversion of the beliefs that had driven the First Comers across the Atlantic. Christopher Jones’s journal of faith and sacrifice could never restore what was lost when those Indians were sent to the slave ships, nor could it inspire men who would make such a terrible choice.

  So he went back to Portanimicut and wondered what he would do with the sea journal.

  At Jack’s Island, Christopher Hilyard wondered what he would do with the axe. He thought to bury it again in the marsh mud where his father had found it. It was the beheader of Witawawmut, the killer of his father and perhaps of many others unnamed. But he could not deny the strength he felt when he held it. And in the wilderness, even the most peaceable Quaker admired strength.

  CHAPTER 17

  July 11

  Iron Axe

  “Shouldn’t you do something to protect the axe?” said Douglas Bigelow. “Encase it in Lucite or something?”

  “Then I couldn’t touch it.” John M.—for Manuel—Nance pushed a button pad to disconnect the alarm, then took the axe out of its case. “I like to touch it.”

  The blade passed under Doug’s nose. He was supposed to admire it while sensing the subtle threat.

  “You could shave with it”—Nance twisted his wrist, causing the blade to flash and the strange letters to fli
cker—“or chop off a head.”

  Doug looked out at the fog on Pleasant Bay and wondered what he was doing in Nance’s library. But he already knew. He was surviving.

  John M. Nance—from Provincetown to Chatham in one generation, from the home of fishing boats and bohos, where the houses were small and the streets were crowded, to the Cape Cod capital of preppy, where even some of the locals wore lime green trousers with their blue blazers. John M. Nance, son of a Portagee and a Pilgrim, great-grandson—so the rumor went—of a runaway slave, looking as respectable as the dining room at the Chatham Bars Inn…

  And as white. White Lacoste shirt, white tennis shorts, white sweat socks. The only color the little Union Jack on his Reebok sneakers. But for all the whiteness, he tanned as well as anyone Doug had ever seen. He didn’t burn and peel like his English ancestors or darken to Portuguese olive. He browned, like a good American who’d never heard of skin cancer or the thinning of the ozone layer.

  He admitted to being sixty-two, though people took him for forty-five or so. His hair was black, no dye job, his current wife was thirty-two, and his features were as smooth as the bow of his cigarette boat.

  He lived on Shore Road in an enormous Colonial Revival with black shutters, twelve-over-twelve windows, wings like studding sails, views of Pleasant Bay, and a secretarial staff so he didn’t have to go to Boston but once a week.

  “This axe reminds me of how hard I had to fight to get here… and who I had to chop up.”

  Doug uncrossed and recrossed his legs, as if to say he was a busy man.

  “Nice pants,” said Nance.

  Doug was wearing lime green pants with little blue whales spouting red steam. Good golf-course pants.

  “So Clara’s dead. One down, one to go.”

  “That’s cold-blooded,” said Doug.